Stephane Allard
Co-founder & CEO at Wisemetrics - Stephane is a serial entrepreneur who has been launching internet-related companies since 2001, after a fruitful experience at IBM as web marketing manager. His latest venture was a pioneering social media agency, sold in 2006, which advised Fortune 100 companies.

Why should I invest in social media? Executives usually struggle to prove the return on investment of their social media initiatives.

Bain & Company argue that “as part of a broader customer engagement strategy, social media can be an effective and cost-efficient marketing, sales, service, insight and retention tool.

Indeed, according to their new research, customers who engage with companies over social media are more loyal and they spend up to 40 percent more with those companies than other customers.

Bain suggest the following 5-step strategy :
1. Link social media efforts to concrete business objective
2. Focus and tailor your efforts to engage your key customers
3. Build a social media organization to deliver results
4. Monitor and measure the results—then close the loop
5. Be flexible and adaptative. It’s still early day